16.1% of India’s ‘literates’ can’t read: IIM Ahmedabad study

Census-2011 reports that the effective literacy rate in India has risen to 74.04%, which is 9.2% higher than the level during the previous census. But how reliable is the Census-2011’s data?

Can those declared literate at least read an elementary textbook?

A paper by two professors of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) says that a sample survey in four Hindi-speaking states had revealed that the Census-11 figures for literacy rate may be exaggerated by upto 16.1%. The main reason for this is that the Census’s methodology was flawed. For Census-2011, citizens were accepted as literates if they said they could read but no practical tests were conducted to test their claims to literacy.

For their paper titled, “Can India’s ‘literates’ Read?”, Prof Brij Kothari and Prof Tathagata Bandhopadhyay of IIMA studied the literacy level among 17,782 people in around 20 villages of 4 districts in four Hindi-speaking states.

These districts are Dausa in Rajasthan, Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, Umariya in Madhya Pradesh and Muzaffarpur in Bihar. 
The sample survey was done by adopting two methods - census method (by just asking head of the family or person if they are literate) and reading method (by practically make people read a paragraph).

Kothari and Bandhopadhyay used both the Census Method (asking head of the family or person if they were literate) and the Reading Method (asking people to read from a text) to determine literacy.

The paper says that the Census-2011 method indicated a literacy rate of 68.7%. Literacy among women was found to be 55.7% and among men it was 80.4%. But when a sample of the respondents was asked to read a Grade 2 text, the results were considerably disappointing. The paper says that a sample, when tested for basic reading ability, was found, at best, to be 52.6% ‘Reading Literate’. In contrast, the method adopted by Census-2011 would have found the literacy level to be 68.7%.

“The Census method could be said to overestimate the literacy rate by at least 16.1%,” states the paper.The paper further says that if the definition of literacy is restricted to persons who can demonstrate a minimum reading ability of Grade 2 (Class 2) level, the reading literacy rate drops further to 25.8%.

“In that case, the Census method could be said to overestimate the literacy rate by an astounding 42.9%,” the paper says. The researcher state in their paper that an average education of Grade 9 is necessary to become a good reader in school. But to become a lifelong good reader a Grade 10 education is required given the present quality of education in rural schools, the paper states.

“A grade 4 to 7 education is more likely to result in weak reading skills in school and later in life. Those who do not complete primary education to Grade 5, are very likely to be non-readers later in life,” the paper states.